The Last Good Man

Righteous Justice

When the shooting stops only a handful of seconds after it started, Lincoln wonders, Is it done?

He and Rohan are still charging toward the house, scrambling around boulders, not trying to be quiet anymore. More shots fired. “Chris!” he pants. “Report!”

“True and Miles are ambulatory, we have secured Shaw Walker, and Roach has two combatants pinned down in the house. I need you up there, Lincoln. Someone’s got to accept a surrender.”

“Surrender?” Rohan demands, scrambling up a final slope. “You mean that’s it? The mechs took the fight and we’re just the cleanup squad?”

“That’s it,” Chris tells him.

“What happened to the road warriors?”

“The copter took them. Welcome to the new world order.”

“Fuck. What the hell are we even doing here?”

Lincoln’s wondering the same thing. Chris answers the question for both of them. “You’re accepting a surrender. Move.”

They never stopped. They climb fast, up to the flat where the house is situated. “What’s Shaw’s status?” Lincoln pants.

“Not good, but he’s alive. True is with him.”

Lincoln holds up a hand, signaling Rohan to pause as they reach the edge of the brush. From here he can look across the flat to see the back of the house and the two parked SUVs. Khalid is bringing their truck bouncing down the lane from the road. No one’s in sight.

He struggles to pull off his camouflage mask with his prosthetic hand, gives it up, holsters the gun, and uses both hands to get the mask off. Sweat trickles down his cheeks. He looks back, and spots Felice a hundred meters behind, following slowly. Somewhere below her, goats are complaining in a chorus of bleats.

Chris says, “I need you inside the house, Lincoln.”

“Yeah.” They need to close things out, pack up, and go. So why the fuck is he hesitating to take the next step?

Rohan peels his mask off too. Gives Lincoln a quizzical look. “Now you get to see him again after all these years. That’s got to be a hell of a thing, given the history.”

“That’s about it,” Lincoln agrees. “Come on. Let’s go.”

They trot together across the flat, meeting Khalid just outside the house. The area under the canopy is a reeking charnel floor.

“Jesus,” Lincoln says, taking in the scene.

The six dead men have all fallen to precision headshots, brought down by Roach in a rough half-circle around Shaw. The starburst copter hovers in a stationary position just beyond them, gun barrel trained on the dead—an eerie sentry, standing guard… in case they have not quite crossed over to the other side?

Miles has a weapon too. He’s bleeding from the back of his scalp, red seepage soaking into his collar as he holds a pistol in one hand, looking like he wants to use it.

“You’re wounded, Miles.”

“It’s nothing,” he growls.

True crouches at Shaw’s feet, wrestling to loosen a bent steel rod that pins his ankles to the ground. She’s weeping.

Lincoln is glad that someone can.

Shaw’s eyes are open, aware, but he hasn’t noticed Lincoln yet. His head is turned as if to contemplate the smooth steel spike that’s been pounded into the ground through his right hand. Blood pools in his palm before trickling to the wet ground. This man, once a friend, a brother. What have you brought us to? A bitter thought. Lincoln’s anger rises, a subsurface flame that burns off both pity and guilt, and hardens his sense of duty. Finish the job.

He turns to Rohan. Voice low, businesslike: “I need you to secure the two men in the house. Take Khalid with you.”

“You got it, boss.”

He tells True, “Let me help.”

She looks up, eyes defiant behind her tears. Whatever she sees, it reassures her. She makes room for him. He uses his good hand and together they work the U-shaped rod out of the hard ground. He gets out his med kit, telling True, “I’m going to put a tourniquet on that arm before we try to get the spike out.”

His work is interrupted by a hoarse whisper from Shaw: “Fucking Lincoln. At least you showed up this time.”

Lincoln stops what he’s doing, the tourniquet only half on. “I thought you were out of it,” he says, meeting those familiar pale eyes. “I’d tell you to go to hell but you’re already well on your way.”

“No argument,” Shaw whispers as his eyes drift closed. “Rihab’s a fuckin’ artist, just like the Saomong. Or he was, anyway.” Cocky still, but his whisper is getting weaker.

True kneels on his other side. She strokes his forehead as if he were a sick child. “You’re going home,” she promises him.

His words are slurred when he says, “One way or another.”

Miles steps closer, the pistol still in his hand, his tone belligerent: “I don’t know. Maybe we should just leave him here.”

“Maybe we should just leave him here,” Miles says, remembering the pain of gravel grinding into his knees and the desert sand soaked with the blood of innocent men on that day when he said nothing. The smell of blood is making him sick.

He has stood here and watched True weep, but he refuses to believe these tears are for Shaw. She cannot be crying for him. Her tears must be for Diego.

“He’s dying,” Lincoln says tiredly, tying off the tourniquet. “You can see that. Let him die in peace.”

Miles checks the chamber on the pistol he’s holding. He only remembers firing three or four shots, so he should still be good. Roger that! There’s another cartridge in the chamber. “Why?” he asks, looking at Lincoln, honestly perplexed. “He doesn’t deserve it.”

“No, he doesn’t. We’re going to give it to him anyway.”

Shaw’s eyes are open again, turned in his direction. Miles feels himself caught in their fierce focus. He waits to hear some smart-ass remark harking back to that day—you shouldn’t have come here, Dushane—but Shaw’s brow only wrinkles in puzzlement as he whispers, “Who the fuck are you?”

True is looking up at him too, wide-eyed, fearful. Only then does Miles realize he has the pistol aimed at Shaw’s head.

“No, Miles,” she says.

Lincoln rises to his feet, gaze locked on the pistol. He speaks softly, “Give me the gun.”

Miles shakes his head in disbelief. “He doesn’t even remember that day. It’s just one more forgotten atrocity for him, one more day of banal carnage. Not so different from today.”

“Don’t make it worse,” Lincoln says.

And True: “What he did to you… there’s no reason for it. No reason for any of it. Nungsan destroyed him. Don’t let it destroy you, too.”

Shaw is the calmest among them. He gives up on the puzzle of who Miles might be. Gives in to the situation. “Hell, you need some righteous justice, brother? Go ahead. Do it.”

Miles is tempted, but disgust chokes off the impulse. Shaw is only playing with words. Miles knows there is nothing righteous here. Not in himself—it doesn’t take a brave man to speak up from behind a gun—and not in Shaw. Miles tells him, “To forget a day like that—it’s pathetic.”

But that’s how it goes. Atrocities, one after another, spinning off from the storm front of violent conflict, so many even the perpetrators don’t remember them all. It’s a reminder to Miles of the idealism that sent him into journalism post-army. It had felt necessary to tell the stories of those affected… both the victims and the aggressors.

It still does.

He lowers the pistol, takes out the magazine, ejects the cartridge.

“I’m writing a book,” he tells Shaw. “You’re going to be in it.” He hands the gun and the ammunition over to Lincoln. “That’s my righteous justice.”

Turning back to Lincoln, he indicates with a nod the spike piercing Shaw’s hand. “You want me to try to find a saw to cut that?”

“Fuck,” Shaw says in disgust. “Just pull it out.”